Final Verdict: ECS PX1 Extreme - FastSilicon.com

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Final Verdict: ECS PX1 Extreme

Friday, 22 December 2006

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Benchmarks

We've spent quite a long time now with the PX1 Extreme, and have found it to be a stable and serviceable board with no drama at all. Of course since we were unable to do any over clock stability testing, there shouldn't have been.

We'd like to thank Crucial and Coolermaster for providing some of the components used in the build.

We built the test system using the following components...

ECS PX1 Extreme P965 mainboard (duh)
Intel Core2 Duo E6300 CPU SL9SA B2 revision core
Arctic Freezer 7 Pro S775 Heatpipe
2-1GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2-1000 DDR2-DRAM modules (4-4-4-12 @ 800 MHz)
2-Crucial Radeon X1600XT PCI-E Video cards (more to come on Crossfire)
Hitachi 160GB 14R9463 SATA HDD
Liteon 160P6S DVD/RW drive
Coolermaster RS600 iGreenPower 600W PSU
Coolermaster Mystique Midtower ATX Chassis

We installed the following software as a base platform...

Windows XP SP2 Professional Edition
ATI Catalyst 6.11 Driver Suite
ECS PX1 Extreme Driver Installation Disc

The following benchmarks were used, with comparisons to two similar P965 boards, the Gigabyte GA-965P-S3, and the Abit AB9-Pro.

Sisoft Sandra 2007 SP1
PCMark2005
Everest Ultimate Edition v3.01.652
CineBench 9.5
Divx Encoder 6.21
Winlame Prerelease4 Win32

Since we had some differences in graphics cards used in the 3 board reviews we decided to forgo the game/graphics portions of our tests for clarity and fairness.

Probably the only "weird" issue we encountered was with Everest Ultimate Edition and comparing memory benchmarks. While most of the variations in Everest Ultimate's memory tests are statistically irrelevant, the L2 cache latency for the PX1 Extreme is quite frankly off the chart at ~23ns, with the other two boards reporting the Core2 CPU's L2 latency at a much more reasonable ~4ns. This we have no explanation for whatsoever.

In the case of Sisoft Sandra's Memory tests, even with the graph scaling differences, there are no statistically relevant differences here to be seen.

PCMark2005 is an aggregate "real world" benchmark that attempts to score a system based on real world performance testing. As to whether this is a totally effective method, that's debatable, but I digress. We did have variances in HDD's used and graphics cards used among these 3 board reviews, and from the graph you do see the ECS PX1 Extreme trailing the other two boards. Here again however when you do the math, the difference isn't statistically relevant, with a performance spread of about 2% between the 3 tests.

Our real world tests involve using DIVX 5.2.1 to transcode a standard little movie file to DIVX avi format, and Winlame Prerelease4 to encode a standard raw wav file to mp3 format at 128kbps. As you can see below, the Abit AB9 Pro edges out both the ECS PX1 Extreme and the Gigabyte board, but again not by any statistically meaningful amount.

Our final test involves using Cinebench 9.5 as a 3D rendering platform benchmark. Since this is a multithreaded application it also puts the dual core's on the E6300 to good use. Here you can see the same trend as above in the real world DIVX and mp3 encoding tests continue to play out, with the AB9-Pro slightly ahead and the ECS and Gigabyte boards nearly identical. And again, even with the AB9-Pro winning the "my graph is bigger than yours" contest, the differences between the three are statistically irrelevant.

All in all, apart from the weird issue with Everest and the L2 cache latency test on the PX1, it's been pretty much a dead heat here, with the AB9-Pro being marginally faster, but with all 3 boards being nearly identical performers.

It's time to wrap things up here.

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